Jake Gyllenhaal went though a 'real mental journey' — and turned to Danny Kaye — for Nightcrawler

Actors are often loath to repeat lines from their films (though fans love it), but at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, Jake Gyllenhaal can launch into swaths of the script from his newest, Nightcrawler

Actors are often loath to repeat lines from their films (though fans love it), but at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, Jake Gyllenhaal can launch into swaths of the script from his newest, Nightcrawler.

And he’s fast, barely pausing for breath or punctuation. “Excuse me sir I’m looking for a job in fact I’ve made up my mind to find a career that I can learn and grow into who am I I’m a hard worker I set high goals and I’ve been told that I’m persistent –” He stops, smiling and huffing like a sprinter. “It was in my skin.”

His character, Lou Bloom, is a driven drifter who finds work providing video footage of crime scenes and accidents to an L.A. TV station. Ambitious and amoral, he’s not above rearranging things (or bodies) to make the shot better.

It’s a fantastic character study and an Oscar-worthy performance, made all the more frightening by the fact that Gyllenhaal dropped 20 pounds to create Lou’s gaunt, hungry look.

“The first weird image I had of Lou was this coyote,” he says. “Hungry, searching at night, bouncing, like coyotes kind of bounce on their feet. It started from that instinct and went from there. A coyote will do anything when they’re hungry … so Lou had to be hungry.”

“It was a real mental journey for me,” he continues. “Coupled with the fact that we were shooting all night. It was transformative mentally. It was almost like the physical was the aftermath of the mental.”

Gyllenhaal has been busy of late, with the range of his roles as impressive as their number. Last year he played a cop in Prisoners, and a history professor and an actor in the doppelganger film Enemy. He was a soldier in 2011’s Source Code and a drug company representative in 2010’s Love & Other Drugs.

But Lou Bloom is something new, and Gyllenhaal credits the script by first-time director Dan Gilroy, whose writing work includes The Bourne Legacy. “If you read the sentences, how they were broken up, the wordage was just extraordinary,” he says. “When I started talking like him it just started to create this guy.”

The intense 33-year-old also talks about exceeding his director’s vision. “Meaning giving it more than he or she ever expected. Meaning they had an idea, and then you do a take and they go —” he throws in an expletive. “That’s the best you can hope for as an actor. Not only going to what the director wants, but surpassing it and giving then more. So you bring every possible thing you can to it.”

Sometimes those things can come from unexpected places. Discussing his favourite older movies, Gyllenhaal suddenly remarks: “Danny Kaye is one of the main influences for this role.”

How’s that? “There’s this childlike quality to Danny Kaye that Lou shares. It’s the part of Lou that people let into their house. Then there’s the other part of Lou that comes out once the door is closed, and they go … why’d I let him in my house? But he has to have that quality.”